Editorial: Domino effect

Opposition Leader Jamie Baillie was out of a job on Wednesday after an investigation into complaints made by a female staffer in his office about inappropriate behaviour. - Lynn Curwin

As the saying goes, the only constant is change.

And change there has been — and quickly, too.

In Nova Scotia, Opposition Leader Jamie Baillie was out of a job on Wednesday after an investigation into complaints made by a female staffer in his office about inappropriate behaviour.

In Ontario, Opposition Leader Patrick Brown left the same day, after CTV revealed complaints about his behaviour involving two young women, complaints dating back to when he was a member of Parliament.

Then, it was federal Sports Minister Kent Hehr — removed as a minister by the prime minister after complaints about inappropriate sexual remarks allegedly made when he was an Alberta MLA surfaced on Twitter.

A CTV news anchor, Paul Bliss, was suspended Friday after a blog post by a former network employee revealed — without identifying Bliss by name — that she had been sexually harassed by a fellow CTV employee. She wrote the blog post after seeing the man she says harassed her posting on Twitter about Patrick Brown’s political downfall.

Then, Ontario PC Party president Rick Dykstra resigned over the weekend, two hours after being contacted by Maclean’s magazine about allegations that he sexually assaulted a Conservative staffer at a party in 2014 — despite knowing about the allegations, the Conservatives let Dysktra run under the Tory banner in the 2015 federal election.

By the time you read this, there may well be more.

If there haven’t been more by then, there almost certainly will be more in the next few days or weeks.

First, because the team nature of politics, the culture of drinking and, dare we say it, the personality traits of many successful male politicians literally make opportunities for abusive behaviour.

Second, because voices that have been stilled in the past — individual, often young, women trying to make themselves heard over the grinding wheels of the respective political machines — finally have the public ear.

Look at the dates on some of these complaints; some haven’t been properly dealt with in over a decade. That means there is potentially a backlog of improperly handled, or even unreported, harassment stretching back for years.

The quick reaction to complaints may mean more women will be willing to come forward — though coming forward is anything but easy. The complainant in the Hehr case, for example, says that, since she first posted her concerns on Twitter, she’s been threatened and maligned to the point that she’s afraid to leave her house. “The last 48 hours has shown me the best of people and certainly the worst,” she tweeted. “This is why people don’t speak up.”

But women are anyway.

It’s a delayed reckoning that probably has more than a few politicians — and perhaps some in the powerhouse world of the Ottawa media scene — worrying about whether there are any skeletons getting ready to come out of their closets.